Chapter 17

Artemvian and Celene waited.

“What are we waiting for?”  Artemvian asked, crunching into another potato chip.

Artemvian wasn’t much taller than her but had his head craned out over her shoulder, trying to peer at the gates.  As he talked, crumbs fell onto her blazer.  Frowning Celene crushed it off.

“We’re waiting for the gates to open.  Once the next shipment comes, we’ll sneak in along with the truck.”

“Uh… and how exactly are we going to do that?”  Artemvian briefly considered using a Veil.  But decided against it for a couple of reasons.  One, he didn’t want to reveal his full capabilities to Celene yet.  She had him pegged as an Empath and he was more than happy enough to let her keep thinking that.  Two, without a staff or other charms, he’d be hard pressed to create a veil that could muffle sound and erase their scents.

Right on cue, a truck drove up to the gates.

“Like this.”  Celene hissed and then abruptly sprinted across the clearing.

She dashed faster than humanly possible and Artemvian thought he heard the whirring of machinery from her legs.  Actually, he did indeed see neon-blue outlines glow from under her pants as she dashed across the space between the alley and the truck.  As she picked up speed, Artemvian had to channel mana into his eyes to keep himself from losing her.  She disappeared from view for a split second, driving herself down to the ground and slid the last couple of feet underneath the truck.

Artemvian whistled as the gates opened and the truck strode in.

“Impressive.”  He muttered, crumpling up the bag of potato chips –which was empty now– and shoving it in his pocket.  “I knew she had nice legs.”

Then he realized something.

She had left him behind.

He laughed.  “Fallen stars and molten rock, she never meant to work with me at all.  She just wanted me out of the way.”

In a way, this was better for him.  This meant that Artemvian wouldn’t have to hold back.

He quickly stepped out of the alleyway, his shoulders hunched and walked around the perimeter wall of teh warehouse.  As he did, he reached out with his hand, fingertips spread wide.  Magic had a deep connection with the Mage’s emotional state as well as the clarity of their thoughts.  The best of mages could cast spells without any verbal or somatic components at all.  But as powerful as Mages were, they were still human.  Their thoughts were affected by their surroundings as much as their actions.

For example, even a skilled mage would be hard-pressed to cast a spell while eating a sandwich and still remember what the sandwich tasted like.  The spell wouldn’t be as powerful either.  When one summoned a Fireball, it was easier to picture a candle than a cup of water in one’s mind.  In other cases, some claimed that using somatic components, like punching a fist into the air, helped Mages focus offensive spells better.

So Artemvian spread his hands out, small pulses of mana being sent out of him and coming back –carrying information of whatever was around him.

He quickly found a section of the wall where the signature of the ghouls was weakest.  Looking around to make sure no one was looking in his direction, he waved his finger in a circle.  

“Ventus.”  He whispered.  Wind came to life around his feet and he hopped, as the wind circled around his legs and turned his hop into a superhuman leap, clearing the top of the wall and landing on the other side.

Besides the huge warehouse, there was nothing else in this concrete wasteland.  Like Celine had pointed out, he saw the three towers in the distance; the lights from them flickering left and right.  He saw some trucks off to the side, parked haphazardly and ignoring the painted lines on the ground.  Moreover, the essence of blood permeated this area, thicker than ever before.  The Ghouls truly had taken this place for their own and it pressed against his arcane senses like a thick fog.

Artemvian felt his eyes turn flat, old instincts returning.

One of his first jobs as a Mage had been to hunt down monsters that killed people.  Once monsters developed a taste for human flesh, they had to be put down.  The one exception were ghouls.  Ghouls never needed to develop a taste for it.

Ghouls loved human flesh since the moment they were born.

Artemvian moved quickly.  He saw one of the lights on the towers flicker out.  It had to be Celene, eliminating the sentries like she had promised.  For all she knew, Artemvian wasn’t in this warehouse with her and he wanted to keep it that way.  But he still wanted to help and try to get Helen out of this place while he was at it.  He walked towards where the undeath feeling was heaviest.

A group of ghouls were prowling, for the lack of a better word, around the front of the warehouse doors. Usually when Ghouls traveled among humans, they were a disguise.  Just like all things that preyed on humans, one of their basic abilities was to blend in.  To keep themselves from being discovered until the last second.

So they looked just like people, standing around doing their jobs.

Artemvian didn’t bother getting into an internal monologue about the philosophical value behind such a tactic.  Right now, all he cared about was that there were four of them and they were all similar in height.

He killed them all with a single spell.

“Ventas.”  He hissed.

The wind sighed as a single invisible scythe whipped out and cut off their heads, whipping back and forth like the end-part of a whip.

Like all things do when Death collects its toll, they returned from whence they came.

As the heads fell, the features shifted into a grotesque misshapen mutilation of what they once were.  The noses sunk in until it was no more, leaving a single gaping hole.  Their foreheads grew larger, protruding forward like a neanderthals.  A somewhat twisted version of what a human could be, somewhere further down the evolutionary line from whence they split off a millennia ago.  Mouths elongated like canines but ended abruptly, like it had been filed off somehow.

Misshapen fang jutted out at weird angles in straight lines –all the more strange because most fangs were made of curves into a single pointed end.  These were straight.  Before the light was snuffed out of their eyes permanently, the black eyes –somehow glowing despite the impossibility of it all– gleamed with a mixture of cold calculating intelligence and primal desire for violence, sex and food.

The bodies and heads fell to the ground at the same time, the death-sounds muffled by the echoing dredges of the sighing wind.

Looking back, he saw that all three of the towers had their lights snuffed out now.

‘Impressive.’  The tech in this world was nothing to scoff at.  From what Artemvian could sense about her, she had no special gifts in magic.  Yet, she’d eliminated three ghouls in the time it had taken Artemvian to get here.

He walked past the four dead –even more dead, Artemvian mused– and opened the door into the warehouse.  Thankfully, it wasn’t locked.

Artemvian thought he had been angry.

What he had felt was nothing more than an annoyance.  It was only when he took foot inside the warehouse that he truly knew ancient rage, anger of a man who spent his lifetime defending the faceless, the nameless, innocent people who fell prey to the monsters, seeing it happen before his eyes all over again.

The warehouse was steeped in blood and flesh, not all from humans.  There were two floors, a flat open ceiling system with railings surrounding the perimeter so that one could look down from the first floor.  Hanging on these railings were red-purple bruise looking pieces of flesh and fore, hanging down like drapes.  Some of them were barely more than a few feet long and others long enough to touch the floor.  Structures made of the same flesh lay littered around, hardly more than three or four feet tall.  Some of them pulsed like they were alive, a large pore open at the top sucking its air and breathing it out like some bulbous alien lifeform.

Then there were the bodies, scattered around as a child does when one is bored with them.

Headless corpses hung from giant meat hooks no doubt used for slaughtering animals.  They hung by their chest, ankles and both wrists, all signs of life and what made them human just butchered out of what remained.  Away from the ceilings, corpses were strewn about, leaning one walls and lying on the floor.  One particular corpse drew Artemvian’s eye.

It must have belonged to a young woman.  Must have.  This corpse drew his eye because it still had it’s –no, she, Artemvian reminded himself– her head.  A pretty girl, except she was missing an eye.  She was wearing a tshirt so drenched in blood that it was hard to tell what color it had been.  Below the waist she was naked and Artemvian knew that some of the ghouls must have had their fun with her –in more ways than one.

In his younger years, sights like this were common.

Deep down inside, he’d forgotten it.  How cruel this world could be.  How merciless.  Like a mother stork throwing her baby off the side of her nest.  Like a mother duck pecking the runt of her school to death.  Like an alligator’s lifeless eyes as it tore a baby deer to death.

Eat or be eaten.  No matter how one felt about it.

Deep inside, he had hoped that this new world would be different.  Even when the evidence was staring at him in the face, he wanted to believe that humanity had found balance.

He was wrong.

It was the same type of world where he came from.

Ruthless.  Merciless.  Full of blood and suffering.  Humans were nothing more than livestock to the monsters that hid in the shadows –without even realizing that they were being preyed upon.

Sickened, Artemvian closed his eyes, then opened it to reveal two glowing blue orcs –leaking trails blue mana into the surrounding air.

And whispered a single spell as four Ghouls converged on him from behind –thinking they were unseen.

“Ignis.”  He hissed.

“Burn.”